Closing departments that serve underrepresented groups most

[Hibush]

OP., what is your school's policy concerning the fate of faculty from dismantled depts? Are they retained? Only retained if the have tenure? Dismissed?

All faculty with tenure homes in the departments will be dismissed.

Posters here are providing a lot of good proposals regarding the decision-making process.

An additional on that I suspected was that the college found it much easier to legally terminate untenured faculty, and these departments had a lot of recently hired faculty. But if they are dismissing all of them under exigency criteria, that is not the case.

If whole faculties are being terminated, I'd expect those with expensive senior faculty and neutral or negative trajectories to be priorities. That would save the most money.

Another possibility is that the departments being eliminated have disproportionately many students whose  greater financial aid makes them expensive for the college. That would be a strong financial driver and one of the "things going on that simply can't be put into documentation."

[spork]

OP., what is your school's policy concerning the fate of faculty from dismantled depts? Are they retained? Only retained if the have tenure? Dismissed?

All faculty with tenure homes in the departments will be dismissed.

Posters here are providing a lot of good proposals regarding the decision-making process.

An additional on that I suspected was that the college found it much easier to legally terminate untenured faculty, and these departments had a lot of recently hired faculty. But if they are dismissing all of them under exigency criteria, that is not the case.

If whole faculties are being terminated, I'd expect those with expensive senior faculty and neutral or negative trajectories to be priorities. That would save the most money.

Another possibility is that the departments being eliminated have disproportionately many students whose  greater financial aid makes them expensive for the college. That would be a strong financial driver and one of the "things going on that simply can't be put into documentation."

^ I'm thinking the administration is interested in mostly cutting personnel costs, with "personnel" defined as faculty.

There are two possible arguments to make:

1) Administration is calculating numbers incorrectly.

2) Administration is calculating numbers correctly, but they are the wrong numbers to be calculating.

[polly_mer]

Did we get concrete answers to Marshwiggle's numbers questions?

What are the declared major student:faculty ratios in these departments compared to other departments that will survive?

How many students enroll in this institution specifically for those programs that are on the chopping block?  How does that compare to other programs?

What does serving the underrepresented community actually look like in these departments that is different (in a good way) from other departments?

I'm picturing humanities departments with low enrollments being cut while engineering departments survive.  The reason for cutting departments with almost no majors while preserving ones that are turning away majors for lack of capacity is not at all sexism/racism/whateverism and is much more about institutional survival.

The questions are worth asking to get quantitative numbers, but the solution may be to help get more diverse surviving departments, not saving departments that are doing good things for a tiny number of people.

[Ruralguy]

It might be that the OP is concerned about dismissing a significant percentage of minority faculty even if other departments have most of the minority students.

[polly_mer]

It might be that the OP is concerned about dismissing a significant percentage of minority faculty even if other departments have most of the minority students.

Yet the big picture remains that a handful of faculty jobs available to practically no one in the underrepresented community is far less important than better k-12 education, safer neighborhoods, and more middle-class jobs in the relevant neighborhoods if the goal is to improve daily life for the underrepresented-at-college groups.

The situation at U Chicago where preferential hiring of faculty in certain English specialties is of almost no effect on the southside of Chicago regular people comes to mind.

Yes, it's a problem to lose faculty jobs, but the solution isn't to ignore the enrollment realities and the mission, which is seldom faculty jobs instead of enrollment, except at the most research-focused of the research institutions where TT/T faculty teach a 1/0 to mostly graduate students.

[marshwiggle]

It might be that the OP is concerned about dismissing a significant percentage of minority faculty even if other departments have most of the minority students.

Yet the big picture remains that a handful of faculty jobs available to practically no one in the underrepresented community is far less important than better k-12 education, safer neighborhoods, and more middle-class jobs in the relevant neighborhoods if the goal is to improve daily life for the underrepresented-at-college groups.

This is basically the essential problem with any "equality of outcome" effort. Forcing the apparently correct optics on the output (e.g. faculty and student diversity) actually draws attention away from the fundamental problems (such as poor k-12 education) because it creates the pretense of everything being "corrected". The unpleasant reality is that the necessary fixes will take years, if not decades, to have the expected results. This is not because of some sort of attempt to subvert them, but because education, like agriculture, takes time to pay off.

[fourhats]

Maybe I misread the original post, but I don't recall it saying that the underrepresented students were necessarily poor (in both senses of the word), or racially identified. For example, I keep running into people who equate first-gen students with black or Hispanic students, although that's not necessarily the case.

Because the closing departments serve many underrepresented students is everyone assuming that it's code for underprepared students? That's how everyone on this thread seem to be taking it. Even in courses/departments that are racially-identified in their course content, that doesn't mean that the students in those courses are ethnic minorities, poor, or underprepared. The OP specifically mentioned women as well. The faculty as well as the students may be diverse--that's been the case at the places I've worked--and in some cases those departments are the newest.

[marshwiggle]

Maybe I misread the original post, but I don't recall it saying that the underrepresented students were necessarily poor (in both senses of the word), or racially identified. For example, I keep running into people who equate first-gen students with black or Hispanic students, although that's not necessarily the case.

Because the closing departments serve many underrepresented students is everyone assuming that it's code for underprepared students? That's how everyone on this thread seem to be taking it. Even in courses/departments that are racially-identified in their course content, that doesn't mean that the students in those courses are ethnic minorities, poor, or underprepared. The OP specifically mentioned women as well. The faculty as well as the students may be diverse--that's been the case at the places I've worked--and in some cases those departments are the newest.

This is part of why I said they need to look at graduations rates and things like that. If the students are doing well in the program that's vastly different than if there are a lot of struggling students (for whatever reason).

[polly_mer]

Even if the underrepresented people are middle-class women, preserving humanities jobs when the need is engineering or CS (or the much less common vice versa) still doesn't fix the problem of having many faculty serving few students in programs that aren't driving enrollment.

If the point is helping identifiable groups of underrepresented-at-the-college-level (which is most definitely not middle-class women except in a few fields) folks, I'm still going to stand by the assertion that seldom is the solution preserving faculty jobs in majors where people have already voted with their feet for something else.  Instead, the focus may need to be something other than K-12 schools, but the overall solution cannot be just those 50, 100, or even 200 faculty jobs for which practically no one is qualified when we include the entire US adult population.

[Ruralguy]

 I fear you are correct, Polly.

Though certain disciplines, such as , say , African-American Studies, might have more minority faculty and more minority students than some other disciplines, it does not mean that this discipline has most of the minorities or that this discipline has a high share of the total students. So, yes, if there are just not enough students driving such a major (and I don't mean to pick on A-A studies, its just meant to be inline with what the OP was claiming), then something has to give. But it means that such decisions need to be made with consideration of demographic as well as financial impacts.

[spork]

I fear you are correct, Polly.

Though certain disciplines, such as , say , African-American Studies, might have more minority faculty and more minority students than some other disciplines, it does not mean that this discipline has most of the minorities or that this discipline has a high share of the total students. So, yes, if there are just not enough students driving such a major (and I don't mean to pick on A-A studies, its just meant to be inline with what the OP was claiming), then something has to give. But it means that such decisions need to be made with consideration of demographic as well as financial impacts.

Unfortunately many faculty at the most financially distressed higher ed institutions see the problem as "How do I preserve my program?" rather than "How do I preserve my employer's financial viability?"

[fourhats]

Though certain disciplines, such as , say , African-American Studies, might have more minority faculty and more minority students than some other disciplines, it does not mean that this discipline has most of the minorities or that this discipline has a high share of the total students. So, yes, if there are just not enough students driving such a major (and I don't mean to pick on A-A studies, its just meant to be inline with what the OP was claiming), then something has to give. But it means that such decisions need to be made with consideration of demographic as well as financial impacts.

Are we talking majors here, or students in courses? Because based on what I've seen discussed there may be departments with declining majors, but with steady course enrollments.

[marshwiggle]

Though certain disciplines, such as , say , African-American Studies, might have more minority faculty and more minority students than some other disciplines, it does not mean that this discipline has most of the minorities or that this discipline has a high share of the total students. So, yes, if there are just not enough students driving such a major (and I don't mean to pick on A-A studies, its just meant to be inline with what the OP was claiming), then something has to give. But it means that such decisions need to be made with consideration of demographic as well as financial impacts.

Are we talking majors here, or students in courses? Because based on what I've seen discussed there may be departments with declining majors, but with steady course enrollments.

The problem is that situation can be manipulated, by requiring all kinds of students to takes courses in the department with the declining major. In principle, a department without a single student wanting to take their courses could be protected by students essentially being held hostage.

[polly_mer]

Though certain disciplines, such as , say , African-American Studies, might have more minority faculty and more minority students than some other disciplines, it does not mean that this discipline has most of the minorities or that this discipline has a high share of the total students. So, yes, if there are just not enough students driving such a major (and I don't mean to pick on A-A studies, its just meant to be inline with what the OP was claiming), then something has to give. But it means that such decisions need to be made with consideration of demographic as well as financial impacts.

Are we talking majors here, or students in courses? Because based on what I've seen discussed there may be departments with declining majors, but with steady course enrollments.

The problem is that situation can be manipulated, by requiring all kinds of students to takes courses in the department with the declining major. In principle, a department without a single student wanting to take their courses could be protected by students essentially being held hostage.

Yes, a big question is whether students are taking courses because they want those courses (e.g., aspiring social workers, nurses, and k-8 teachers who want to know more about their likely communities they will be serving so they purposefully take extra courses in ethnic studies) or whether students are picking the checkbox requirements based on schedule and perceived ease of getting an A.

Again, the question is whether people are enrolling in the institution to take those classes (i.e., driving enrollment), are at least interesting in taking the courses while enrolled for some other primary reason, or are being required to take courses that aren't common for the major in other institutions.

I have many examples of institutions that have declining enrollment because the programs are out of step with what is now standard for those programs while trying to prop up course enrollments for unrelated departments. 

[fourhats]

I was specifically referring to students who want to take those courses, but not necessarily wanting to major in the department. I've seen plenty of those students in my classes. I don't know how a department can require non-majors to take anything in their departments. And again, we aren't necessarily talking about ethnic studies.

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of departments tell their majors to take at least one course in another department.I've seen engineering departments require their students to take a humanities course, for example. This can be true of all kinds of majors, probably more so if institutions now have a diversity requirement. So those closing departments may be serving lots of other departments in the university. And again, I'm NOT particularly saying that closing departments are in ethnic studies.

Please, I'd really rather not see any responses about whether or not diversity requirements should exist. That is another discussion altogether.